What a Difference a Host Makes: How Media Temple is Ruining the Grids Good Name
I must admit, I was a Media Temple customer – for six long agonizing days. This showed me that Media Temple is destroying clustered hosting’s good name.
To give some background, UNEASYsilence used to be served at Hostway on a pair of Pentium 4 machines. After two years of strong growth we outgrew those poor little servers and had to look for a new host. At the time money was very tight, and I was enticed my Media Temple’s seemingly sweet Siren-esque calls offering cheap, yet powerful utility computing. Who can resist $20 a month for ‘crash proof’ hosting? After populating the MySQL table and testing, I flipped the switch and the system collapsed. That was the beginning of the deterioration of Media Temples previously high quality of hosting. The one thing I can never deny Media Temple is that they are passionate people. Their support technicians (who have been increasingly harder to contact lately) are dedicated hard working individuals. For those six days I dealt with kind customer service representatives who tried to coax the shoddy grid to stay online. After speaking with their lead technician several times, I was not convinced that Media Temple even understood how to properly admin a cluster. To show how little faith Media Temple has in their Grid, they refuse run their own website on it.
After some quick research I found one other provider in the US that had web server clustering, and signed up. That was the best hosting decision that the site could have ever made. The host: Mosso. They are based on the Rackspace’s high-end, high-availability network providing a strong foundation with their legendary uptime. Mosso was founded by Todd Morey and Jonathan Bryce, two freelance web developers, because they were once in a similar spot as me. They were not happy with the scalability of shared servers and shocked with the price (and lack of expandability) of dedicated server support.
After speaking with the founders, I knew they understand grid hosting, or as it is properly named-clustered hosting (the systems run in tandem not parallel). The clusters that power Mosso’s hosting are designed to do a specific task – and to do it extremely well. If a server is purposed for PHP 4, it will only have what is necessary to run PHP installed with all other unnecessary software features removed. Also, as demand for a specific task increases servers can dynamically repurposed to handle the additional load. An intelligent router analyses a web request and sends the data to be processed to the appropriate server. The really awesome thing is that with Mosso, a single website can run PHP (Both versions 4 and 5), ASP, HTML, Python, and Perl – all at the same time. I believe that is a hosting first. I can yammer on forever about the technical specs, but you can read them here (trust me you don’t want to try and recap them – I would get all the technical mojo confused). On Media Temple your PHP technology is selected for you, and there is no ability to select your hosting OS which is kind of restrictive.
Mosso’s support team, just like its technology, is top notch. I have an account manager that proactively monitors my account and the system to ensure the service lives up to their promises. Thinking that this site was getting preferential treatment, I had an associate of mine secretly sign up for the service, and he received the same quality of support for his less then 40-a-day visitor website as I did for mine. There are some drawbacks. The webstats are a little weak, email is not as full featured as I would like, there is no SSH or SFTP access, but all those features are being upgraded in the near future. Again, those technologies are minor setbacks. Mosso feels it is more important for them that they focus on keeping their hosted websites online and fully test technologies, unlike Media Temple who seemingly is beta testing their product at their customers’ expense.
In closing, Media Temple, instead of writing a dissertation about how you plan and fail repeatedly at fixing your serious problems STOP ACCEPTING NEW CUSTOMERS! Your infrastructure can’t handle the existing load, why add even more? Your recent Grid upgrade has crumbled, the SQL infrastructure doesn’t work (matter of fact it has recently destroyed customer data), your email (specifically SMTP server) doesn’t work, your web stats don’t work and your web servers don’t work as promised. We appreciate your candor about your struggles, but do us all a favor and shut down your grid or stop accepting new customers, you are giving the grid technology a bad name. Remember you get what you pay for!
Why am I ranting? It is to release some steam at Media Temple – they deserve it. But also to let web users know that there is an affordable, dynamically scalable clustered web host that cares about keeping your site online, and keeping the customer base happy.
We have seen some serious spikes in traffic and Mossos reliability has been nothing less rock solid. I’m sure the same will be true if this post gets Dugg, Mosso again will prove their reliability.
